A question of ‘critical mass'

Walking across the South Mall, or scanning the football stadium's 100,000 seats on game day, University of Texas admissions director Kedra Ishop sees how much has changed since the 1990s, when she was a black student at what was an inordinately white school.

This giant flagship campus – once so slow to integrate – is now awash in color, among the most diverse in the country if not the world. The student body, like Texas, is majority-minority.

At the dining hall, minority students no longer cluster together. Actually, it's more a high-end food court now, and many tables are racial mosaics – white, black, Hispanic, Asian.

So is this the “critical mass” of minority students that U.S. Supreme Court narrowly endorsed in 2003 as an educational goal important enough to allow colleges to factor the race of applicants into admissions decisions?

That question will be front and center Wednesday when a more conservative Supreme Court revisits affirmative action for the first time since that landmark case involving the University of Michigan.

The university, looking back

History isn't central to the legal issues in the affirmative action debate, but it's an issue at UT-Austin. The football team didn't integrate until 1970, and even as minority enrollment expanded, UT little resembled increasingly diverse Texas, leaving minority students feeling isolated.

“It was very seldom three or more were gathered,” said Machree Gibson, who arrived on campus in 1978, earned two degrees and later became the first black female president of the Texas Exes, the university's powerful alumni group. “We used to joke, ‘Three in a room, we're a gang.' ”

Today, even a short drive through campus leaves Gibson amazed how things have changed.

But UT still doesn't look like Texas. Of its 52,000 students, 5 percent are black (compared with 12 percent of the state population). Hispanics are 18 percent at UT (38 percent statewide) and Asians 15 percent (4 percent statewide).

Michigan and the numbers

In the Michigan case nine years ago, psychologists, educators and most influentially the military flooded the court with briefs arguing a diverse learning environment helped prepare students, both whites and minorities, for jobs and citizenship. Many also argued it takes a critical mass of minorities.

How many? There was no magic number. But enough for minorities not to feel isolated in the classroom and for non-minorities to realize minorities' views weren't one-size-fits-all.

Those arguments convinced Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the court's key swing vote. In her majority opinion in the 5-4 case, she gave Michigan and other universities leeway to define critical mass in terms of their own educational goals and to use race as a plus-factor in admissions to get there (O'Connor has since been replaced by Samuel Alito, an affirmative action skeptic).

The Texas case

In Texas, a 1996 federal appeals court ruling had prohibited UT from using race in admissions, and black enrollment had plummeted. A year later, the Texas legislature passed a “Top 10 percent” law, guaranteeing UT admission to any student at the top of his or her Texas high school.

The law was race-neutral, but it boosted the number of minorities – by some measures, close to current figures. To UT's opponents, that proves UT can reach ample diversity – even “critical mass” – without resorting to racial preferences.

But UT says the diversity produced by the 10-percent law was stilted. Ninety percent of smaller classes had one or zero blacks, and 43 percent no more than one Hispanic. A student survey found minorities felt isolated, and a majority of all students felt there weren't enough minorities for “the full benefits of diversity to occur.”

So for the relatively small portion of its class – currently about one-quarter – not admitted automatically by their high school performance, UT designed a system to mimic what the court had allowed in the Michigan case. In that second system UT emphasizes race is a small factor, among many “special circumstances” that may be considered. It's also not automatic and could benefit any applicant.

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